Drone Warfare in the Nuclear Age

Tom Dispatch, OCTOBER 15, 2023

When it comes to war, increasingly autonomous drones are now, it seems, the name of the game.  Only the other day, in its stunning surprise attack on Israel, Hamas claimed to have launched 35 explosive-laden al-Zawari “kamikaze” drones that it had produced, destroying Israeli tanks and other equipment. Hamas videos also showed “multicopter drones dropping explosives on Israeli security towers, border posts, and communication towers.” And mind you, Israel was already using swarms of drones as early as 2021 to strike targets in the Gaza Strip.

Of course, in the present world of war, they are anything but alone. The conflict in Ukraine, for instance, has become remarkably drone-ified on both sides. In drone terms, however, if there was one ominous thing about the recent reactions of Israeli officials to the Hamas attacks that took their country by surprise, it was the comparison of them to al-Qaeda’s assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  (“This,” an Israeli military spokesman typically said, “is our 9/11.”) The disastrous American response to those events, the Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror,” has never truly ended and, from Afghanistan to the Middle East to Africa, it introduced drone warfare to the world (in the process killing countless innocent civilians)……………………

Swarms vs. Swarms

How Intelligent — Artificial or Otherwise — Is Any of This?

BY MICHAEL KLARE

A war with China may not be inevitable, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks observed recently, but it’s a genuine possibility and so this country must be prepared to fight and win. But victory in such a conflict will not, she suggested, come easily. China enjoys an advantage in certain measures of military power, including the number of ships, guns, and missiles it can deploy. While America’s equivalents may be more advanced and capable, they also cost far more to produce and so can only be procured in smaller numbers. To overcome such a dilemma in any future conflict, Hicks suggested, our costly crewed weapons systems must be accompanied by hordes of uncrewed autonomous ships, planes, and tanks.

To ensure that America will possess sufficient numbers of “all-domain attritable [that is, expendable] autonomous” weapons when a war with China breaks out, Hicks announced a major new Pentagon program dubbed the Replicator Initiative. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people,” she told the National Defense Industrial Association as August ended.

Because we can’t match our adversaries “ship-for-ship and shot-for-shot,” given the prohibitive costs of traditional weapons systems (which must include space for their human crews), we’ll overpower them instead with swarms of autonomous weapons — unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs and UASs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned surface vessels (USVs), and unmanned subsea vessels (UUVs, or drone submarines), all governed by artificial intelligence (AI) and capable of independent action……………………………………………………………

After all, the Department of Defense has already awarded many millions of dollars to assorted AI start-ups and traditional contractors over the past half-dozen years to develop advanced UAVs, UGVs, USVs, and UUVs, and yet not a single one is in full-scale production. …………………….

questions about this country’s ability to deliver such systems on the tight timetable Hicks announced should be the least of our concerns. Far more worrisome is the likelihood that such a drive will ignite a major new global arms race with China and Russia, ensuring that future battlefields will be populated with untold thousands (tens of thousands?) of drone weapons, overwhelming human commanders and increasing the risk of nuclear war.

The Illusion of U.S. Drone Dominance

…………………………………….. China and Russia have no lack of smart, creative scientists and engineers and, far from trailing the United States in the development of autonomous weaponry, have actually taken the lead in certain areas…………………………………..

…………………the Pentagon’s own report also indicated that China is making rapid advances in the development of AI software for use by autonomous weapons systems in complex combat operations of exactly the sort envisioned by Deputy Secretary Hicks…………………..

many Western analysts do believe that China leads in certain areas of AI and autonomy. Its military has, in fact, regularly flown advanced UAVs in large-scale combat maneuvers around the island of Taiwan, demonstrating a capacity to employ such systems in complex operations.

Russia is thought to lag behind China and the U.S. in developing and fielding advanced autonomous weapons but has nevertheless demonstrated a significant capacity to use UAVs in its war on Ukraine. It has deployed large swarms of semi-autonomous Iranian-made Shahed-136 suicide drones in attacks on its cities and electrical systems, causing widespread death and destruction………………………………..On June 28th, the Russian government approved a “Development Strategy for Unmanned Aviation Until 2030.” It called for exponential growth in UAV output, which, according to reports, is expected to increase from approximately 13,000 per year between 2023 and 2026 to 26,000 annually from 2027 to 2030 and 35,500 after that.

……………………………………………… On the Future Great-Power Battlefield

Given all of this, it should be evident that going to war with China or Russia in the not-so-distant future on the assumption that the U.S. will enjoy a significant advantage in autonomous weaponry would be delusional — and very dangerous.

Yes, both of those potential adversaries currently trail the U.S. in certain categories of autonomous weapons like uncrewed surface and sub-surface combat systems, but they will still be capable of filling the skies with multitudes of drones and seeding any battlefield with hordes of autonomous combat vehicles, including uncrewed tanks and artillery systems.

It would, in fact, be reasonable to assume that any future great-power conflict — a U.S.-China war over Taiwan, for example — will be characterized by the concentration of approximately equal formations of traditional military mass (composed largely of crewed weapons systems) and uncrewed autonomous versions of the same, incorporating multitudes of AI-governed drones.

How would such a conflict play out? It seems unlikely that either side would achieve a swift, one-sided victory. Instead, both would be far more likely to experience massive losses of weapons systems and warriors, with vast swarms of drones only intensifying the destruction by attacking anything left unscathed by traditional weaponry. ……………………..

The toll of such a conflict would surely be colossal. …………………………………………………………………………………

 “how quickly a conflict could escalate, with both China and the United States crossing red lines.” The CNAS report further suggested that, in an actual war, “China may be willing to brandish nuclear weapons or conduct a limited demonstration of its nuclear capability in an effort to prevent or end U.S. involvement in a conflict with Taiwan.” (Nothing was said about the possibility that the Americans could do anything similar.)

………….. The result would likely be ever-spiraling losses and increasingly dangerous escalatory measures. As growing numbers of autonomous weapons become available, they, too, will be thrown into the fight, further magnifying those very escalatory pressures. With swarms of such devices battling other swarms — at sea, in the air, and on the ground — the risk of catastrophic defeat will loom ever larger and the temptation to employ nuclear weapons that much harder to resist. Whatever fantasies of American dominance Deputy Secretary Hicks might be harboring in promoting the Replicator Initiative, a safer, more stable world is not among the likely outcomes.  https://tomdispatch.com/swarms-vs-swarms/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=4cc10fe538-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-4cc10fe538-308765045 #nuclear #antinuclear #NuclearFree #NoNukes #NuclearPlants

October 16, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war